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sila: whoa!! that sure looks like fun! well done on participating and great job learning! hopefully you can…Hisham: Sure thing, Luke! Hope to see the birthday wish too if it’s possible.Luke: Hi, I would like to use one of ur photo to design a birthday wish for Sitiawan. I would put a credit …Hisham: Let’s just say “Canto Bight” was originally the name of some Tapani Sector noble’s pet duck.Edward: Or the city was named after the planet. Or they were both named after some forgotten dignitary. Weird…sila: glad that opah felt better though. hope she continues to feel healthy.sila: yay to a successful surgery! i hope you are recovering nicely. i’m imagining weird things with the s…Hisham: Thanks, chief. And yes I think your name is the longest we’ve ever had on here. Haha.

About

Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.

All of a sudden another year ends. I can't believe we've lived here for more than a decade now. I can tell you how the skyline has changed over the years; and where on the landscape we were once able to make out traffic on the MRR2 highway. Through the changes in how the city looks, there are a few things that never seem to change: chief among it is the attitude of many drivers here. I could go on about that but I wont.

I'd like to say here's to a better 2013, but I think I'm just going to say if I do not deserve any better than perhaps I should not get it. But it gets better, I'd be grateful.

Many months ago, I had a nightmare. Well, it's not as much as a nightmare as it is weird things happening in my dream in which I should be creeped out but I don't. I haven't had a proper nightmare from which I wake up feeling scared for a very long time.

I was walking home with friends at night under a bright full moon, and home was an apartment above a shoplot. You know the type, where you climb a single flight stairs to get to your door. At the door out on the sidewalk, I felt like I was being watched. I thought to pull aside the doormat. Beneath the doormat, in a hole, was a gigantic biological human-like eyeball. It tracked and was fixed on me wherever I moved. I don't remember any eyelid.

I covered up the eye with the mat and quickly locked the door behind me and headed up to the house. I locked the upstairs door and stepped back, facing it, waiting for someone or something to smash through the door. Moonlight cast my shadow on the door. Suddenly, the shadow disappeared. As did the moonlight.

I turned. And before me, climbing through the window, was this Mi-go with its wings spread out once it had space and its tentacles from its head and abdoment flailing out at me.

Tarrasques are the most lethal creatures without a destructive breath weapon in the Dungeons and Dragons mythology. You don't need a lot, just one will do in any RPG campaign if you need a continent or two levelled.

This is either a very young tarrasque from the planet Falx (if we're playing in a Spelljammer campaign) or a midget tarrasque. In both cases, I think the city in the image will have an hour or two before it's reduced to rubble.

Back in secondary school, for some reason that I can't recall anymore we suddenly had this bat as our mascot so to speak. Its name, Wotsit the Confused Bat, also popped up unbidden. It was easy to doodle and we doodled it here and there and everywhere. There was an earlier design where the bat had no moth and bigger shoes, but we finally decided on this design, created by my best friend.

Here it is once again, in a digitally painted form, for old time's sake.

A follow up post from the earlier D'Kathi alien concept design, here are the final artwork commissioned by Christopher Mennell for his Across The Stars science fiction game setting. While it starts out looking and feeling Star Trek with a lot of analogous signature elements, it diverges in many ways and has the potential for imaginative game masters to take it into high concept science fiction.